While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

Irish Catholicism is an important motif in Kissinger’s memoir, particularly in her childhood and particularly around questions of sex. Kissinger details the pressure Jean felt to have as many children as possible because her religion dictated it. Jean was shamed for wanting to go on birth control, even after having eight children. This shame was passed to Mary Kay as well, who struggled to reconcile it with an abortion she had. Such attitudes exacerbated the Kissinger family’s experiences with mental illness.

Irish Catholicism informed Kissinger’s childhood in other ways as well, as she was sent to a strict Catholic school where she was often told that suffering was a gift that would lead her closer to God. Her grandmother believed the same and would often preach this around the home, and Kissinger saw the effects manifest in the family’s instinctive concealment of pain. In addition, the Catholic Church did not allow people who died by suicide to have a Catholic funeral, connecting directly to Nancy’s death, about which Kissinger’s parents lied so that she could be buried in consecrated ground. 

However, despite the often restrictive ideals of her family’s religion, Kissinger also found comfort in going to church and in her belief in God. As a young child, she remembers a feeling of safety when she thought of God: “The mighty elms that lined our redbrick street formed a kind of leafy cathedral ceiling. Many nights, I lay in bed and stared out the window, pretending that the branches were the arms of God holding us tight” (46). As an adult, Kissinger continued to go to church, feeling that the consistency and reliability of it was a strong comfort in a chaotic world.

Alcohol is a constant motif in While You Were Out, illustrating the effects and the dangers of concealing pain. The Kissinger family tended to mask their sorrows with alcohol, “good times,” and humor. Alcohol played a major role in Kissinger and her siblings’ upbringing, as her parents spent most of these years drinking regularly. Kissinger reflects on her parents’ own upbringing and the reasons that they relied on alcohol as a source of comfort and calm. She believes that the losses they suffered, paired with growing up during a time when regular drinking was commonplace, came together to magnify the already powerful influence that Jean and Holmer had on one another. When Holmer decided to join AA and quit drinking, Jean wondered whether her social life would diminish, highlighting the ubiquity of drinking in a social context. Kissinger, too, grew up in an era where drinking was typical and often even encouraged from a young age, and she acknowledges having used alcohol in the same way, relying on it as a way to pretend that nothing was as bad as it seemed.